Physical properties of Maria asteroid family

An asteroid family is a population of asteroids in the proper orbital element space (a, e, i), considered to have been produced by a disruption of a large parent body presumably through a catastrophic collision. Asteroid families offer unique opportunities to reconstruct and characterize the break-up history of airless bodies in the main-belt. The Maria family is a typical old population (~3${\pm}$1 Gyr) of asteroids that have undergone significant collisional and dynamical evolution in the history of the inner Solar System; it is also believed to be one of the candidate source regions for giant S-type near-earth asteroids (NEAs). However, to date, physical characteristics of this family members such as rotational periods have been known only for 61 of the larger asteroids among 3,230 objects, which accounts for less than 2 percent of the family. In this presentation, we provide some preliminary results of our recent study: out of more than dozen of the family members, lightcurves for eight objects have been obtained for the first time. We plan to increase the number of target objects, and investigate evidences for the Yarkovsky/YORP effect on Maria family based on our observations.